Women

Women don't make it to the top because they don't deserve to.  They're crap....  They inevitably wimp out and go suckle something.

 - Neil French

Satan's Child Revealed

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

Now if only our professors and business executives could figure this one out, the world might be a smarter place.

Plans for the Future

When one's significant other adopts the status of impregnation, one tends to reflect in ways that are not necessarily common to his nature.  In some cases this takes the form of planning for the future.  I have compiled a list of things to be accomplished by my offspring in chronological order.  Assuming I do not perish in childbirth or the assistance thereof, I will provide this list to the little growth upon its ingression.  I may return to the subject after further reflection, but as my mood stands, the chemical depository must:

1. Speak in full sentences before it can walk
2. Swim at least 2 legal strokes before it is weaned
3. Sleep 8 hours a night or learn to cry "mama", not "aaah"
   
4. Recognize the difference between a trope and a theme before it recognizes the difference between milk and juice
5. Learn to read before it learns to change the channel
6. Potty train itself by age 1
7. Know how to mix a good drink or to open a beer
8. Select an appropriate mate
9. Select an appropriate pre-school with fast-track liberal arts focus and college choices posted on the wall
10. Learn to fail in appropriate circumstances so as to undermine and disguise its inherent genius
11. Learn to cheat only when it already knows the answers, but has more important things to do in life than simple mathematics or scientific equations
12. Learn to appreciate the plight of the lunch-lady, yet despise her insolent ungratefulness
13. Stay out of petty arguments by means of erudite sarcasm cleverly disguised as "pussying out"
14. Know the appropriate moment in which to establish dominance in social situations
15. Graduate Kindergarten in the middle of the class
16. Read every book in the house before getting a new one from the Library
17. Be able to adequately explain in concise detail the central purpose of any book or be forced to read it again
18. Spend all of second grade in silence and learn the distinction between false humility and vain conceit
19. Successfully accomplish the requirements for the USA Junior National Team
20. Describe in detail the intricate relationship between Farmer and Samurai in Kurosawa's films
21. Build a little empire out of some crazy garbage called the blood of the exploited working class.
22. Skip fourth grade
23. Learn not to ask why everyone else is so slow to realize that it is indeed the rightful ruler of the world out loud
24. Spend the next twelve years in college studying and appreciating the minute pleasures of life.

By this time, the brood will be of age and wisdom enough to return to its mate and determine its path of success.  At this point it will have many options:

1. Become the first great American author
2. Write an exposition of the modern English language that reveals how inferior it is in comparison to modern Russian
3. Win 9 Gold medals at the Olympic games
4. Become a hermit
5. Birth a child
6. Take over the world
7. Destroy the world

Any final realization, or all of them, is acceptable.

Bauerlein's Irony

Maybe he was serious.  Maybe he was up late downing pots of coffee because he felt obligated to squeak out some form of intellectual commentary on the state of higher education.  Maybe he knew what he was doing and knew it was flippin' hilarious.  Whatever the case, Mark Bauerlein of the Chronicle of Higher Education made me chuckle this morning.  In an article about the apparent lack of aesthetics in the ever-increasing vocational age and college students' inability to write palatable sentences, he writes this:

With college campuses becoming ever more preprofessional and vocational, it's getting harder for humanities teachers to get freshmen and sophomores to appreciate the aesthetic side of things.  That goes for both their interpretation of texts and for their creation of texts. They read everything for the kernal of fact and value, the information, the point, not for the expression (whether beautiful or vulgar or flat or conventional . . .).  And they write sentences that have no flair, no element of balance, rhythm, metaphor, or other aesthetic feature.

(emphasis mine).  I find this last sentence utterly hilarious in its own right, but the entire article is like this--short, pointless sentences with no imagery, flair, metaphor, or balance...

As Predicted

Remember back when I wrote about the posthumous publication of Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura?

This is the most ridiculous marketing ploy in the history of mankind.  People will do what I am doing now--they will berate the publishers, tear apart the novel before they have read it, then read it and pine for the last wishes of a great and dead white man--and the publishers will use it to make more fatuous and puerile productions to draw in those who have never before thought about reading a 500 page novel.

Well, now it's been released, and every publisher and reviewer out there is following my predictions to the  letter, viz.:

Before Nabokov's death in 1977, he instructed his wife to burn the unfinished first draft—handwritten on 138 index cards—of what would be his final novel. She did not, and now Nabokov's son, Dmitri, is releasing them to the world, though after reading the book, readers will wonder if the Lolita author is laughing or turning over in his grave.

Every review I have read concerns the nature of the release more than the actual content of the book.   I am dismayed, but not surprised.

Dystopia in Kentucky

 A few miles west of Cincinnati, near the northern Kentucky town of Petersburg, there’s a gleaming new monument to Christianist ideology called the Creation Museum. It was built by an Australian Biblical literalist named Ken Ham, the founder of Answers in Genesis, at a cost of twenty-seven million dollars, raised mostly in small donations. It opened over Memorial Day weekend with a blast of media attention (Edward Rothstein wrote two pieces about it for the New York Times), and since then ten thousand people a week have been flocking to its exhibits. Last Sunday, on a visit to my in-laws in Lexington, I joined them.

More here.

Tempestuous Procedures

Sometime around 1610, Shakespeare penned The Tempest, one of his most famous and interesting works.  Except he didn't really write it.  At least not the whole thing.  On his own.  I dislike as much as anyone bickering and arguing about whether Mr. Shaxpere or Sir Bacon, or whomever the hell else might be involved actually wrote one play, sonnet, line, or word, but evidence in The Tempest is overwhelming.  Yet this work remains, without the Author's explicit signature, one of the great literary masterpieces of all time.  The work, whether we like it or not, is a great work, with or without Shakespeare's involvement.  If it was completed by a court jester or a plebeian patch worker, or a bourgeois land-owner, our Marxist critics will have a bit of a time reading it, but they cannot deny its beauty (actually, the New World allusions, the dis-Utopian and power-play tendencies of the play make it quite a Marxist mayhem!).

I assume that I do not need to argue the point that The Tempest is a great work.  Nor should I need to argue that it stands apart from its author(s).  But consider this:

A new wave of posthumous books by iconic authors is stirring debate over how publishers should handle fragmentary literary remains. Works by Vladimir Nabokov, William Styron, Graham Greene, Carl Jung and Kurt Vonnegut will hit bookstores this fall. Ralph Ellison and the late thriller writer Donald E. Westlake have posthumous novels due out in 2010.

How can I logically read a Graham Greene or Vladimir Nabokov novel I know has been tampered with?  Do I want to read it?  I have become familiar with the authors based on the books I have read previously, and now it is quite difficult to overcome my desire to reject these posthumous offerings.

My reasons for not wanting to read these books are different than you may think.  It is not because I want to preserve an aura of health and holiness around the author's oeuvre.  I have come to terms with the fact that someone I have never heard of, who was chosen at random by Knopf's low-ranking no-name publisher, will finish Vlad's book.  Nor do I really care whether he or Twain or Kafka requested that their stuff be burned (they should have burned it themselves, a fact which reduces their intelligence in my mind) after death.  I don't want to read the books for the same reason I have never liked Michael Jordan--it's all a publicity stunt.

The Original of Laura, will cause more debate over its construction and publication than over its literary content.  That pisses me off.  The publisher is going to put the 138 index cards that the novel was penned on in perforated sheets so you can reconstruct the novel yourself.  WTF.  Lolita was written the same way.  Can you imagine putting Humbert Humbert's reflections on innocence after his final encounter with Lola?  Didn't think so.  This is the most ridiculous marketing ploy in the history of mankind.  People will do what I am doing now--they will berate the publishers, tear apart the novel before they have read it, then read it and pine for the last wishes of a great and dead white man--and the publishers will use it to make more fatuous and puerile productions to draw in those who have never before thought about reading a 500 page novel.

As Prospero says in the Epilogue to his play,

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

I hope to God that the writings of average authors will stand above their stories and give good credit to the only name that will appear on the dust jacket (besides Alfred A. Knopf pub., or HarperCollins).  That they may say, "What strength I have's mine own."

The Humble and Defecatory Posture (and Unpredictably Irregular Poetry Exposure #12)

Something humble, placid even, about inert feet under stall doors.  The defecatory posture is an accepting posture, it occurs to him.  Head down, elbows on knees, the fingers laced together between the knees.  Some hunched timeless millennial type of waiting, almost religious.  Luther's shoes on the floor beneath the chamber pot, placid, possibly made of wood, Luther's 16th century shoes, awaiting epiphany.  The mute quiescent suffering of generations of salesmen in the stalls of train-station johns, heads down, fingers laced, shined shoes inert, awaiting the acid gush.  Women's slippers, centurion's dusty sandals, dock-worker's hobnailed boots, Pope's slippers.  All waiting, pointing straight ahead, slightly tapping.  Huge shaggy-browed men in skins hunched just past the firelight's circle with wadded leaves in one hand, waiting.

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

Shittard
Squitard
Crackard
     Turdous.
Thy bung
Hath flung
Some dung
      on us.
Filthard
Cackard
Stinkard:
     St. Antonie's fire seize on
           thy toane,
If thy
Dirty
Dounby
     Thou do not wipe ere
            thou be gone.

Will you have any more of it?  Yes, yes (answered Grangousier.)  Then said Gargantua,

A ROUNDLAY
In shiting yesday I did know
The sesse I to my arse did owe:
The smell was such came from that slunk,
That I was with it all bestunk:
O had but then some brave Signor
Brought her to me I waited for,
       in shiting:
I would have cleft her watergap,
And joyn'd it close to my flip-flap,
Whilest she had with her fingers guarded
My foule Nackandrow, all bemerded
     in shiting.

Gargantua and Pantagruel - Francois Rabelais

Reporting Folly

I generally avoid reading newspapers and current events stories, but a few days ago I unintentionally clicked on a link on my wife's homepage and was taken to an article about the recent helicopter tragedy. This piece of reporting, if it can be called that, is horrific in its pure absurdity. The first sentence of the article, where the poor New Jerseyans were forced "to scamper for cover" evokes frightened mice in a Godzilla-style mishap. The need to report the Mayor's prognosis that "the collision...was 'not survivable'" almost seems like a line from Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, especially for the poor "thousands of people enjoying a crystal clear summer day." Then, as if it couldn't get any worse, the reporter insists that "this time, there was no miracle," and the Mayor chimes in with, "This is not going to have a happy ending." I am truly appalled.

NEW YORK – A small plane collided with a sightseeing helicopter carrying Italian tourists over the Hudson River on Saturday, scattering debris in the water and forcing people on the New Jersey waterfront to scamper for cover. Authorities believe all nine people aboard the two aircraft were killed.
...
The collision, which Mayor Michael Bloomberg said was "not survivable," happened just after noon and was seen by thousands of people enjoying a crystal-clear summer day from the New York and New Jersey sides of the river.
...
But this time, there was no miracle.
"This is not going to have a happy ending," Bloomberg said. Hours after the collision, he said he thought it fair to say "this has changed from a rescue to a recovery mission."